"we are on post apocalyptic land"

aboriginal art i saw & loved in “australia”

I like art because I have a soul however I take the ‘art world’ and people who seem comfortable within it or aspire to be comfortable within it with a bucket of salt coz… suspicious af. idk “it” has always felt so easily, inherently antithetical to radicalism and i mean sure maybe not everything has to be about fostering anticolonial networks of global care but all the pontification, all the fuss… it just always felt, to me, spiritually devoid, pretentious and kinda boring? And also, very much out of my reach.

I do think ultimately my unwavering feeling stems from the historical poverty of my family. Not just poor, but poor poor. as in, i went to my grandmother’s house last week and suggested we draw each other, to find out that she had literally never drawn before in her life because her hands were so busy cooking and cleaning and protecting herself poor. And to be honest my portrait of her also looked like my first time ever drawing so intergenerational trauma is real ok?? No-one in my family, including me, has ever “bought art” but my mum has a colour photocopy of Chris Ofili’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’ framed above the television and my grandmother’s trinkets shelf is stunning. I didn’t particularly grow up going to galleries but in any fragments of memory i have, I found them boring then too.

nani ji’s first drawing, a portrait of me, sept ‘24

I wanna be outside. I wanna see what the sea spat out. I wanna look at your grandmother’s trinkets shelf. I want to frame the psych ward paintings or bury them or burn them. I want to abolish galleries in imperialist nations. The world surrounding the art in this neck of the woods… such a flattening experience, the only real display, one of power.

So yeah, i’ve never been massively interested which is OK for me because I’m a community organiser before anything else and only god knows if that’s a calling i will regret submitting to. However, if I’m moved to check something out I will. Like my friend KL told me the first day we met that he doesn't go to countries outside of the one he was born in unless he’s invited which I feel is such a beautiful way of receiving guidance, of treading lightly, and I feel I have the same instinct, for completely different reasons, with galleries or art shows or whatever formalised displays of what has been considered “art” in a given context. And so when I’m invited, literally or spiritually, i might go.

Im an art critic now lol. But earlier this year i was invited to so-called australia by genius Riana Head-Toussaint of Crip Rave Theory and this is my second post about it coz it changed me or i had a nice time. it’s a place I didn’t think I’d necessarily ever go to but was always open to visiting perhaps counter intuitively due to a longstanding passion for murder in the outback horror film genres and also a profound love of Australian soap, Neighbours. The first time i think i ever saw an Aboriginal person was also on screen, via Baz Luhrmann’s wildly problematic 2008 epic, “Australia”. Though i have not watched this film since 2008, and generally have a horrible memory, i remember David Gulpilil’s scenes with clarity, coz he’s that kind of artist. And i remember too, the devastation I felt, learning that “Australia” was another state built upon the unthinkable violence of genocide. 

it is hard to know what to do with oneself during this time of rabid white supremecist settler colonialism, this gruelling nightmarish time. Work trips across the world are probably not the answer, even if you’re invited, but i felt such promise and comfort in Naarm and Gadigal Country - such warmth from the people and land - such beautiful, sorrowful, heartfelt resistance. and as we choked on land acknowledgements, such clarity; that nothing is as it should be. With the present baring heavy and fearing the future, in australia i became possessed by an art hoe demon and spent almost all the spare time I had either very much outside or pouring over indigenous collections in various museums and galleries. It felt different to most other gallery experiences i have had - effortless, grounded, holy, though no less fucked up i’m sure. Nose pressed against glass, so hungry for the nation before this one, for acknowledgement, for answers, for something else.

anyway here’s some of the art I loved

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Embassy by Richard Bell (2013) THE BLAK INFINITE, Federation Square, Melbourne

this iconic exhibit was very moving to see, especially on the land that inspired it. I like the way we are invited to inhabit it. while watching the films inside the tent, I learnt that australia was declared ‘terra nullius’ barren, nobody’s land by the british, to justify invading aboriginal land, the same language historically used by is*ael and the british in their colonisation of palestine.